It was perfect, like a scene from one of her favorite vids. Feeling like a player in a drama, Kristen walked across the almost deserted road and looked down at the body they'd left behind. She had his wallet in seconds, then saw the small metal box lying on the sidewalk glistening with rain. A couple of other pedestrians had just appeared, but with no gangers in sight, Kristen had all the time she needed. With the night's spoils safely in her bag, she continued on toward Merriman.
Serrin had had to cool his heels for hours after his arrival in Redmond. Word was that Tom was down in the Jungles, but somehow the elf didn't want to meet him there. It seemed almost like an invasion of privacy. The elf passed the time browsing through the bazaars of the Bargain Basement, avoiding the more obvious manifestations of Mafia and yakuza business enterprises, buying a pair of clamshell brooches as much out of boredom as anything else. Come five in the afternoon, he made his way to the old haunt.
"Well, well, whatddya know?" Janus said when Serrin came through the door of Crusher 495. "You some kinda bad penny, turning up again?"
The elf smiled ruefully. "Been a long time, chummer."
"Sure has. But we been hearin' all about you on the trid," the barman said, his smile making his face curl up like a cat's after cream.
Serrin shrugged, looking around at the old familiar places. He recognized some of the faces and the place still smelled the same too, a pungent, not unpleasant scent of beer and sweat.
"Hear you're some kinda hero these days," came an ork voice from the shadows. It was only partly a challenge.
"I'll make you guys a deal," Serrin said. "I get the beer, you forget the drek, okay?" The hubbub of enthusiasm aroused by his offer told Serrin he was even more at home than he'd expected.
He was halfway through his beer when the sudden hush told him that Tom had arrived instants before he felt the ham-sized hand on his shoulder.
"Hear you been looking for me," the troll said in the same tone he might have used with a friend he'd last seen yesterday instead of five years ago. Serrin swiveled round on the creaky bar stool and looked up at his old friend. It was a moment of great wonderment as the elf sensed almost viscerally that Tom was changed, utterly and irrevocably. A kind of transformation Serrin had never experienced and reckoned he never would, though he had the power to recognize it. He picked up his glass and ordered a beer for the troll.
"Nan. The usual, Janus," Tom said cheerily. Wrapping his huge fist around the glass of mineral water the barman served up, he guided Serrin to the seclusion of a quiet corner.
"I guess we got a lot to catch up on," he said for starters.
The ID in the wallet said the slag was from the Loop district. Nothing special, not the real money of Castle or Buitenkant, just a company man. The plastic told her he worked for Kruger, drove an Elektro, was smart enough not to carry an organ donor card, and had managed to talk his way into more parking permits than seemed reasonable. Normally, Kristen would have taken the credit card and sold it to some tsotsi at the docks, but not this time. The police would be investigating this murder and she didn't want to find herself sitting in a jail cell waiting for the special treatment they reserved especially for a mixed-race suspect.
After removing the rands from the wallet, she wiped the synthetic leather and the plastic cards clean of any fingerprints, then tore some pages from the tabloid and wrapped them around the wallet. She dumped the soggy pages in a trash bin at the junction of Merriman and Ocean View, making sure no one was watching, and then headed west. But Kristen didn't feel much like dancing anymore, and she cut back through to High, toward Western Boulevard, where she could find a coffin hotel for the night. Even with her newly acquired wealth, she begrudged the handful of rand she had to dish out, but that was just her old survival instincts.
Sitting down on the creaky bd, she realized how terribly tired she was. She pulled up the coverlet to inspect what was underneath, finding clean sheets and no more than the usual quota of stains on the mattress. Best of all, there didn't seem to be any bugs, though that didn't mean she wouldn't be visited by the usual roach or two. Somehow, it wouldn't have felt right without them, though Kristen hoped they'd be the smaller variety. Pulling off her leggings and blouse, she was about to try to get some sleep despite the flickering of neon through the thin curtains when she caught the glint of light on the metal box lying among her things on the floor. She picked it up and examined it.
It looked like a pocket computer, a miniaturized laptop, though it wasn't any bigger than her own hand. There weren't any numbers or obvious symbols on the tiny keys, but she had no idea how to use such a thing anyway. Idly, she pressed a few keys out of sheer curiosity, hissing as she caught two with one fingertip touch.
The small screen on top of the box suddenly lit up and a message appeared on it. She couldn't read the words telling her that a deletion process was in operation, but she guessed that something bad was happening from the tiny skull-and-crossbones icon at the left of the screen. Then she pressed the entire keypad, desperately hoping that she wasn't ruining the thing. A string of identical symbol-pairs ran across the screen left to right and the light behind the screen winked out.
Frag it, I've broken it, she thought miserably. It might have been worth hundreds. But, what the hell. I can't complain. This hasn't been such a bad day.
She threw the inert box into her bag and took out some long cigarette papers and the last wrap of dagga, then smoked herself some immunity against the wake-up effects of the glaring neon blinking on and off outside her window.
"I did come back a couple of times," Serrin said defensively. "You know amp; afterward." He didn't know what to expect from Tom, but the quietness of the huge figure seated opposite was as startling as the mineral water he
was sipping. Back in the old days, the troll would have been finishing a second pitcher of beer by now.
"I know. You came down in June and September of 'fifty, but I hadn't changed," the troll said gently. "Guess you thought it would be a mistake to try to pick up the pieces. Shock treatment doesn't work if you're not prepared to go through with it."
"Something like that," the elf said. Somehow, he didn't want to let himself off the hook. He could remember the scene as if it were yesterday, the troll lying almost senseless with drink in a vomit-splattered room, Serrin standing over him, screaming impotently at his friend. Then the elf had walked out and slammed the door, never getting close in person again except to pass through now and then to inquire after Tom. At first it was because he couldn't take the pain of seeing his friend destroy himself, but later it had been the shame of having abandoned him.
"Don't worry, chummer. It's not that heavy. You couldn't save me. Nobody could have. But I think you kept me alive long enough for it to happen." The troll grinned suddenly. "Frag it all, nobody else would have carried me off and locked me up in some hellhole to dry out for a month. Craziest dumb thing I've ever known anyone to do."
"It was the best I could think of at the time, apart from buying you a new liver but you were too full of implants and metal anyway," Serrin said, then realized the clumsiness of his words. If Tom was now a Bear shaman, every piece of cyberware in his body would be hateful to him, an alien presence reminding him of a past he'd rather forget. Wouldn't it? The troll seemed to read his mind.
"It's all still there," he rumbled. "The smartgun link, the reflex job, the muscle implants. Never had the money to remove 'em, and it's dangerous anyway. I just gotta live with it. I'll never be able to run with Bear; more like limp along. But it don't worry me too much."